March 25

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On the 25th we took brunch to Granddad. It was delicious. We enjoyed hanging out with him again.

Here's that magnolia tree, in the sunshine.

Ready to race.

Going outside to sit with the dog for a bit.  After all of that 40-degrees(F)-above-normal weather, it was a relief to have only-15-degrees-above-normal weather!

Green, against winter-naked trees.

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March 24

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I mentioned, yesterday, that there was a mini-roadtrip in store.

It was time for the Masters' Swim State Meet.

Last year the state meet was near Grand Rapids. This year it was north of Detroit, just over an hour from home.

Given that our daughter wanted to be in the water by 8:30 am, to warm up for her events (which started, both Saturday and Sunday, at 9:00), she and I stayed in a motel nearer to the pool. My better half decided he'd rather drive more, and sleep in his own bed, so that's what he and Wilbur did.

She swam in three events in the morning. She was very happy to swim some of her best times since college. Yay!



She bought good bread, corned beef, and French salami while I was getting the oil changed, on the 23rd. We took those things, along with other lunchy stuff, and visited Granddad, who doesn't live too far from where our hotel was. We had a very nice lunch, and enjoyed hanging out with Granddad for a few hours.

This lovely magnolia is across the street from Granddad's house.

Eventually my better half and the dog went back to Ann Arbor, and we went back to the hotel room to crash for the night.

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December 11

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Sunrise, with golden condensation-on-the-window bokeh.

We went to a Masters' swim meet.  It was a fun meet -- all relays.

Too bad they didn't put some more windows in this space.  It was quite dark in there.

The only windows in the whole place, letting sun shine on a small patch of pool.

I like that the floor tile is red in front of the pillars, but wonder ... why.  Just because?

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November 13

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Crack-of-dawn road trip.

Listening to A History of the World in 100 Objects (podcasts recorded on the ipod).

Watching the Masters swim.

Interesting sky at the end of the day.

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April 17 -- masters' swim -- state meet

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On Sunday we got up early, showered and ate, packed the car, and checked out of the hotel.  The rain had stopped, but it was *VERY* windy, and only in the 40s (F).  We dropped the swimmer by the pool door, and took the dog for a quick walk.  I was wearing a fleece jacket, and a wind-breaker.  My wind-breaker was not up to the task. I could feel the wind blowing right through it.

It was pretty nasty outside.

Luckily, it was much nicer inside.

This is a frame of video -- in the third lane from the left, you see my daughter on her way to winning (in her age group) the 200 yard freestyle!  Only a couple of women went faster than she in this event (and only a few men!).

Yesterday I mentioned a couple of differences between masters' swim and high-school/college swim.  I'll add that the average amount of time needed to get out of the water is much higher at a masters' meet, and also that a fast woman goes faster than a much higher proportion of the men than she did in high school or college.

As with practically anything, there is a vast dimension of skill and talent in swimming.  The heights are very high indeed.  A person can be very good, even extremely good, and there are people who are still better.

I have described our family experience with competitive swimming this way -- For an ordinary person, my daughter is a very good swimmer.  For a very good swimmer, my daughter is an ordinary person.

This reality is starkly clear when your high school team includes two future Olympians.

Some people can do things that we will never (ever) be able to do, no matter how hard and diligently we work........  Which surely doesn't mean that we shouldn't practice those things, hard and diligently, and do them as best we can, should we choose to!  Being fastest of all is not the only reward (improving our personal best is also satisfying)........



It struck me, on the 17th, that masters' meets are the first opportunities we've had to watch our daughter compete with other ordinary people.  No Olympians, nor current NCAA champions, in this pool, on this weekend.....

It is exciting to have such people on your team, and it is exciting to watch them swim.  On the other hand, it can be nice to have them be ... elsewhere, filling up the fastest heats of someone else's races.  It is rather excellent go to a meet where they are not present, and find that you belong in the fastest heat of all your events!

(Ed. note:  No Olympians in the pool, but there was an Olympian's brother.....  A name we recognized as belonging to four brothers who swam at boys' state meets we attended, when our daughter was in high school......  The brothers went on to swim for the University of Michigan.  All four qualified to try out for the Olympics in 2008, and one swam for the USA at the Olympics in 2004 and 2008.  It was the oldest of the brothers who swam at the masters' meet on the 16th and 17th.  You'll know I'm predisposed to find him intelligent and charming, when I mention he complimented my daughter on one of her swims.)



After the morning session, we went out to get some lunch.  Another chain restaurant, but this time everything was ok.  It is sad when "ok" is an improvement, and -- what a contrast to the food in France, where finding something good is so much easier (as the proportion of truly good food to the rest is so much higher)..........  Julia is right -- eating really is different, in France, from the way it is here..............  The French care about food to a degree that is rare amongst people here in the USA.

I do think this is changing, but it has an uphill battle, as I thought yesterday, when I saw a 49-cent loaf of what an awful lot of people here think of as "bread." If something supposedly edible is cheap and there's a lot of it, and better yet, it has a lot of salt and grease, most people here think it's "good."  Nevermind if the "bread" is tasteless and gummy, or if the "meal" is 80% fat, contains 273% of your daily sodium, and the sole spot of color is the ketchup.................

Thank you, Mom, for caring about nutrition, and for feeding us actual food rather than the stuff an awful lot of Americans eat!



After lunch, we went back to the high school.  We had some time, before the meet would resume.  The kid stayed in the wind-rocked car, reading, while my better half and I took the dog on another quick walk.

In the middle of one of the baseball areas, there was a goose egg on the grass.  It was still cold and still WINDY, but you knew I had to stop and get a pic of that.

I'd seen some Canada geese the day before, so I wasn't totally surprised to see an egg, but goodness.  It was on grass, right in the middle of the playing area.  Nothing remotely nesty anywhere near.

Perhaps it was laid by an inexperienced young mother.............  Or a thoughtless older one.  (This is making me wonder -- how much control does a bird have over when an egg is laid?  There must be SOME control, or more eggs would land in other-than-nest places.......  A puzzlement.)



Wilbur had NO interest in the egg.  I'm not sure he even noticed it.  You see him expressing his opinion that it is HIGH time to GET MOVING and get back in the car, out of the wind!!!!!!!

I asked to have a foot placed near the egg, so we could see how big it was.  I don't think you can tell from this, but I bet that egg was 4" in its longest dimension.  Large.

W. in the back seat, in his "room," in his towel nest.  On Sunday morning, I covered him in towels (and covered the side vents of the crate).  Just before I left him, I ran the car for a bit, to warm up the inside.  When I came out, he was asleep, and, when I checked, nice and warm.  I had wondered how he'd do, alone in the car while we cheered for swimmers, but he was fine.

Outside the car, it was still windy.  VERY windy.  But at least the clouds were breaking up.  With the sun shining, even part of the time, it warmed up quite satisfactorily in the car.  (The goose egg was actually visible from here, but I'm not seeing it in this pic.....)

Our swimmer didn't swim until the middle of the afternoon.  Wilbur and I hung out in the car.  He napped.  I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

I'd read it before, and enjoyed it.  My daughter checked it out of the library, and brought it to Grand Rapids.  I'd finished Julia, and hadn't brought a novel, so I read it again. And enjoyed it again. It's very nicely written -- smooth and clever and humorous. The dark parts (dealing with WWII, the occupation of Guernsey by the Germans, and the aftermath of the war) are handled directly but not harrowingly (all the bad things happened in the past, though some do come to light during the book's present).

It's impossible not to wish that I knew Juliet, and could expect a letter in response when I wrote to her......

I recommend it highly, as another book that takes you away to a different time and place.....  Guernsey sounds like a paradise.  In peacetime, anyway......

Where was I, over the weekend? Grand Rapids, a swim meet, France (especially Paris), London, Guernsey........



The afternoon was splendidly successful in the pool.

At about 5:00, we started eastward for home.

On the drive over, and back, we listened to podcasts from A History of the World in 100 Objects. What an interesting concept!!!

My daughter had downloaded a bunch of the 10-minute episodes to her ipod (which plugs into the car's audio system). We heard about an Olmec mask, a Roman silver pepper pot, a Chinese bell, a Peruvian embroidered textile.... Some of the "objects" weren't, exactly -- we heard the episode on pepper....

The BBC has done an excellent job of focusing on, and explaining, the way the objects were woven into their times and cultures.... Very interesting (though a bit frustrating -- I wanted to SEE the objects! They can be seen online, of course, so I am looking my way through them.....).



Where was I, over the weekend? Grand Rapids, a swim meet, France (especially Paris), London, Guernsey........  And Mexico, Britain, China, Peru.....

We drove home, through serious wind gusts, on dry (and not too crowded) Michigan expressways, learning about objects from around the globe that were 2500 - 1500 years old.

Snapping the odd pic, here and there, of Big Sky,

Big (apparently very productive) Fields,

and more Big Sky.

A safe and not-too-long trip (about two hours), lightened by edification.

We were all glad to be home, after a very good weekend away.



One more weekend thought -- I was reading a blogger who said she really didn't understand how people could be bored, when there was so much infinitely fascinating stuff to observe, everywhere. I have to agree -- not only the natural world, but the internet, and the library.............. Adding an interested and interesting 22-yr-old to your household is an excellent way to diversify the mix of things you notice and investigate. The books she's reading, the movies she checks out of the library, the podcasts, the music............ Definitely an enhancement to our lives.

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April 16 -- masters' swim -- state meet

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I didn't take any pics on our way to Grand Rapids.  There were expressways; there was traffic; the sky was cloudy; the landscape was brown......

We found our way to the hotel without trouble, unloaded, found provisions for supper, attempted sleep in too-squashy beds, got up at the crack of dawn, got showered and breakfasted, and found East Kentwood High School (where the meet took place).

East Kentwood's high school has a huge athletic campus.  Many ball diamonds, a football stadium with tall bleachers, a ton of tennis courts, even an ice-skating facility, right on the campus.

Plenty of big sky, looking west over the campus.

Many things about the swim meet looked familiar.

Some things looked quite different.  We were not accustomed to seeing competitors with gray hair.  (We've seen lots of bald heads -- it is common for high-school boys to shave their heads before the state meet -- but not gray-haired bald heads.....)

This was Wilbur's first trip to a swim meet.

A high school campus was a perfect place to have a dog in the car.

Plenty of room to walk, plenty of grass, not too many questionable strangers walking by the car when he was outside alone.....

I mostly stayed in the car with Wibbs, reading, while my better half was inside (with his own selection of books).  He called me when our swimmer's next swim was imminent, which worked very well.  I saw all of her races, while keeping the dog from feeling abandoned.

On Saturday, I read Julia Child's My Life in France. I enjoyed it very much. I'm so glad to have seen Julia on tv -- I could hear her voice on every page. The book is replete with her enthusiasm, good will, and joie de vivre. I was taken along on her journey of discovery -- how different eating is, in France, from the USA; her growing determination to learn what she needed to know, so she could make those French delectables by herself; her experiences at the Cordon Bleu school; her mission to write a book that would allow dedicated Americans to cook in the French way (and the struggle to get that book published); how she came to be on tv (and how much she enjoyed teaching).



I read for many reasons. One is that I enjoy being transported, from where I am, to ... elsewhere. This is surely a book that does just that. I'm thinking I need to read
Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And maybe to see if the library has recordings of Julia's PBS shows..........



From time to time, during the morning of the 16th, I would leave France, and walk from the parking lot, along the high school, through double doors into the lobby, up the stairs, to the pool spectator area. I'd watch some swimming, yell some encouragement, enjoy swimming success. Then I'd walk back outside, to return to Wilbur, and Julia, and Paris.



As it happened, the swimmer had three events on Saturday morning, and none in the afternoon. We went back to the hotel at lunch time.

We had thought we might explore some of the parks of the greater Grand Rapids area, but it was raining, and chilly.  Not really nice at all for strolling (or sniffing). In addition, there was a LOT of traffic in that part of the world. The many-lane road in front of the hotel was packed solid with vehicles.

My daughter and better half walked to the chain restaurant next door to the hotel.  I am sorry to report that, though their expectations were low, they were quite disappointed with the fare. They brought me back a bowl of soup and a salad which were ok -- which is more than they could say about what they had............

Given the weather and the traffic (and the fact that we had a dog, so we couldn't go see museums, or something else indoors), we ended up spending a lazy afternoon in the hotel.

Many worse things have happened.

We all checked our email, we all read our books. I was sorry to finish My Life in France.



Here is Wilbur's "room" in the hotel.  We'd arranged it with a nice pile of folded towels, topped with that orange fleece.  Here it is after he rearranged it to his satisfaction.

You can just see him, lying in the back.....

In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these swim meet posts, here is a link to the next one.

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our weekend

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We spent the weekend in suburban Grand Rapids (Michigan), at the Masters Swim 2011 Michigan state meet.

Our daughter swam for her high school, and swam for her university. Masters swim is a (much less intensive!) way for swimmers to stay in the pool, get some exercise, hang out with other swimmers, and compete, if they wish. Competition is by gender, by age, with five-year groups -- under 25, 25-29, 30-34, etc.

For those of you who have never been to a swim meet, there are many events. There will probably be 50-yard freestyle, 100-yard freestyle, 200-yard freestyle, for example. ("Freestyle" is what we used to call "crawl," back in the day......)

At a big meet there will probably be many heats of a popular event like the 50 free. The pool only accommodates so many swimmers at one time (6 lanes? 8 lanes?). If the pool is eight lanes, and 43 women are swimming the 50 free, there will be six heats, starting with the three slowest people, and then the next-slowest eight people, and ending with the eight fastest people. The intent is that a heat be comprised of competitors of similar ability.

At a masters' meet, you may have winners in every heat. If only one woman in the 60-64 age range competes, she will win every event she swims, regardless of how fast anyone else in her heats (or any other heats) may swim.

While it's true that the oldest people tended to be slower, and the youngest tended to be faster, it's also true that most heats had people who were several decades apart in age. Nineteen-yr-olds with forty-five-yr-olds, for example. Where else can the young bucks and the silverbacks stand on level ground (sort of!) in an athletic competition?

This was our first big masters' meet. It was *excellent* to see so many people in their 70s and 80s racing! How wonderful that they feel good enough to race, that they get out and swim on a regular basis, that swimming is an activity that is so inclusive (and healthy!)!!!!!

I asked my better half, yesterday, when was the last time he was at an athletic competition with such a high average age. He asked me if bridge counted, and I said "No. Unless you sweat because of physical exertion necessary for the activity, it's not an athletic competition!" (This is an on-going joke in our household, as the bridge people have tried to get bridge designated as an Olympic sport!)

It was all very interesting, and all very inspiring, and was a huge paradigm shift from a very competitive high school program (our daughter's high school team were national champions two of the three years she was there), and a serious college program, to a much more low-key and fun way to swim. Not that people weren't serious about competing, at this state meet, but there was more of a sense of proportion. At least that is this spectator's take on it.

It was one of those times when you honor every single participant, just for being there, and for all the work that preceded being there.

Good job, all!


In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these swim meet posts, here is a link to the next one.

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December 12 -- swim meet!

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How long has it been since I posted something on the same day it happened!  :-)


We went to a swim meet! Our first meet since February of '09.

Our daughter has started swimming with the masters -- people who have aged out of college-age swimming.

The meet today was just for fun -- all relays and some silly events, like a kickboard relay and a tshirt relay.  Until the kickboard relay, I'd never heard of a swim relay where an object was exchanged.  (All four members of one relay team used the same kickboard.)  At least you can't drop a kickboard......  That is, you can let go, but it doesn't fall down below the level at which is is used.....  :-)

I'd never heard of a tshirt relay, either.  All members of a team have to wear the same tshirt. Sequentially! You wear the shirt. You swim your 50 yards, touch the pad under the blocks that keeps time, then climb out and "hand off" the shirt to your next teammate, who has to wear it to swim her/his leg....  (the yellowish rectangles below the blocks on which the swimmers in orange are standing, with the black plus sign on them, are the touch pads)

(The photographer/journalist would like to thank whoever put orange tshirts on these people -- that makes it MUCH easier to see what's going on!)

Here go the first swimmers.

I was thinking they'd be losing huge amounts of time swapping the tshirt, but my daughter's team had a brilliant idea.

The person who just swam, and the person who will swim next put their arms on each other's shoulders, and the top of their heads together, and their other two teammates pull the shirt right off the one who just swam onto the one who will swim next.

How smart is that???

And they practiced ahead of time, too. :-)

The shirt is coming off the guy who swam second, and going on to my daughter, in the dark blue cap at left.

Transfer complete; she is ready to go.

Switching the shirt from my daughter to the guy who will swim the 4th and final leg.  You can see him at left -- light blue cap and sort of flowery? suit (just under the blue diving-board diagonal).

Now he's ready to go.  Note other teams struggling with the shirts.....

The swimmers are looking at the scoreboard.

I think this was the closest event of the whole meet.  Our team came in second.

Masters swimming is broken down by age.  Our daughter was the only swimmer, today, who was under 25, so she automatically won all of her events.  She actually was the fastest woman in the 50 free today.  The meet was small enough that no events were broken out by gender.  Only two men went faster in the 50 than she went.  Pretty good, after taking more than a year off, and only starting back in the pool this fall!

We enjoyed the meet.  It was nice to have it be so low key.
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Feb. 14

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Warm up.





Put your game face on.





Set world record.

Yes, people, that was our kid's name on lane one -- 41 seconds for a women's short-course yards 100 freestyle. The previous record holder was Lisbeth Linton, who went 51.7 at the Australian Short Course meet in 2005. That was meters; according to SwimmingWorld's converter: "0:51.70 in short course meters converts to 0:46.32 in short course yards."

41 -- world record shattered!





What really happened was that the scoreboard messed up. On the previous heat. That board doesn't reflect the swimmers who were in the pool when it froze in that position, nor any semblance of the actual swimmers' actual times.

It took quite a while to fix the scoreboard, too, which leaves everyone who was all ready to race twiddling their thumbs..........



Back outside, so someone whose kid hadn't yet swum could sit.











We looked at a lot of palm fruit in the Bahamas. The local critters must not favor this, or there wouldn't be so much left, I figure.





More excellent bark.







I don't know who these belong to. I wish I had picked one up and pried it open -- they look interesting inside, peeking through the cracks........... I did not enhance the yellow inside; what you see is precisely what the camera remembers.





I don't know who this belongs to, either. I didn't see until I got it up on the "big screen" that someone drilled through to neatly get at each seed.





Counterpoint to the extreme shagginess.

This has its own appeal. Love how every little difference is magnified by the otherwise-smoothness.









Across the street from the aquatic center (to the east) is a parking lot. The 14th was the first time we walked all the way through the parking lot to discover the very nice park directly east of the parking lot.

We won't be seeing any of these, here in A2, for a long time.





Leaves fall off the trees, in Charlotte, but its "winter" isn't like Michigan's!





It's not usual to find nice clean tree silhouettes in urban settings.









What a pleasant place to spend a little time!





At this point we got a phone call, saying it was time for lunch.

We took our swimmer, and the two girls with whom she shared a room in Charlotte, and went in search of food. I had done some hunting down of restaurants and directions before we left home.

Guy Fieri visited Charlotte for his Food Network show "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives," and went to Bar-B-Q King. The girls decided that they had to go there, so we worked on getting there. We knew where the road was, but getting ON that road is oddly difficult. We take that road into town from the airport, and have trouble finding it, and we had trouble finding it at the town end, too.

Strange, because it's a big road..............

Poor girls; we drove them all over the place. But we finally found it.

It is really a drive-in, which none of the girls had seen before. We made up our minds from the little billboard menu thing by the car, pushed the button on the box, gave our order, and a nice man brought out trays and trays of barbecue, onion rings, pie, drinks..........

Eating in the car was tight -- we were glad to have all those trays.

It wasn't the best food I've ever had, but it wasn't bad, and it was certainly an Adventure.



That night there was Senior Recognition before the meet started. There were a lot of seniors. It is rare for our daughter's team to have more than a couple of seniors. The class of '09 actually has more girls than they began with -- two transferred in and only one of the original five quit swimming.

I've been telling you how far away our girls were from spectators -- I was standing on the edge of the pool to take this pic. The boys in white you see behind our seniors are on bleachers just like the ones our girls used during the meet (and are beside the ones our girls used). Eight lanes of pool, between us and them. The pool deck was behind me as I took this pic, and the spectator bleachers are behind that, and up. Pretty far away from the swimmers.





In addition to the distance, and the backlighting, I think I must have had the camera on a weird setting just then. Nearly all of the pics I took were quite worthless. Very blurry and odd -- as though I had it on some sort of long-exposure setting. [annoyed sigh!]

For this purpose the pic is fine (faces decently obscure), and I like the reflection.....





After the meet ended, we all went out to dinner. This was problematic, because of the date. Apparently half of greater Charlotte takes their sweetie to eat at Outback on Valentine's day. It was very crowded, and if we hadn't had a parent with Influence, I don't suppose we'd all have eaten before noon on the 15th.

In past years the parents have eaten in the same room with the swimmers, if at different tables, but this year.... Not. Ah well.

After dinner we dropped our kid at her hotel. Spring break is soon; it won't be long before we get to see her again.

She sent her flowers with us, figuring there was no way she could get them back to Baltimore unscathed.

I found an appropriate vase in our room...........









I'd been looking at this motel-room lamp, plus shadows and reflections, and decided I'd better make an attempt to capture it. I like this lamp a lot better than most.





After visiting Charlotte three Februarys in a row, it is very likely that we'll never go back. Odd, spending that much time driving around, finding restaurants, art museums, etc., and then never again..........

Charlotte, from what we've seen, is a pleasant place. Not too big, not too small. There is a nice shiny new light-rail system, and all the construction makes it look like a city on the move.

Fare well, Charlotte. It's been real.

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